Nine years ago, Ming Tsai took his then 6-month-old son, David, to the allergist with a horrible case of eczema and was told what no parent wants to hear—especially one obsessed with cooking and eating. David was allergic to soy, wheat, dairy, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, and eggs—seven of the "big eight" foods that account for 90 percent of food allergies. (The last is fish.) "He was off the charts," says Tsai, 45, owner of the award-winning Asian-fusion restaurant Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and host of the PBS cooking show Simply Ming. "My first thought was, This is a joke from upstairs, right? Because he's the son of a chef?"
Tsai's wife, Polly, who was breast-feeding David at the time, cut those foods out of her diet, and later they gave him the hypoallergenic formula Alimentum. "When he was ready for solids, I got involved," Tsai says. "Luckily, there's a lot of rice in Asian cuisine. He was eating organic New Zealand rack of lamb with fried rice and line-caught halibut with rice noodles. You couldn't feel bad for him."
That changed one day when David was 3 1/2. At a diner near their home, Tsai told the manager about his son's allergies while ordering, and the manager declined to serve them. "I wanted to smack him," says Tsai. "David asked me, 'Why can't we eat here?'" Tsai told him the food wasn't good there, and they left. "Now if you have food allergies, you're discriminated against? I never wanted to put David through that again. Changing restaurant policy became my calling."
Soon afterward, Tsai (who has a second son, Henry, 7, with no food allergies) became a spokesperson for the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN). For the past four years, he has worked on and lobbied for a Massachusetts bill requiring restaurants to place posters in kitchens explaining how to handle food allergies, and to have menus that ask patrons to let waitstaff know about any they suffer from. Eateries are also encouraged by the Massachusetts Department of Health to keep a list of all the ingredients in every dish, so their employees can answer clients' questions. (Tsai has kept such a "food bible" in the kitchen of Blue Ginger since it opened in 1998.) Senate Bill 2701 was signed into law this past January and went into effect in April.
And there's more good news. David has outgrown all his allergies except the peanut and tree-nut ones—a feat Tsai largely credits to an alternative healer and allergy specialist his son sees weekly. But he says the best advice for parents has to do with attitude, not energy meridians: "Don't let allergies dictate your life. If you make them into a big deal, your kid will feel handicapped and start to close in on himself. I've always been superpositive and have told David that someday he won't have them anymore. Food is one of life's greatest joys, so just be safe and smart. And if a restaurant says, 'We'd rather not serve you,' get out and find one that will."
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